The Science Supercluster
The Science Supercluster or SSC was a massive computer server farm running an ungodly amount of scientist uploads for decades on end. It was Sol's long-term plan for attempting to keep scientific progress happening into new fields and greater heights. It failed. This failure is what led to the techological plateau hypothesis. "Sol tried very hard to get further ahead. It didn't work. A lot of physical experiments were performed: a number best expressed in scientific notation kind of a lot. Didn't help." - foamy The Birth "The mindset, the sheer spunk and optimism, the circuit- and gut- deep conviction that things would forever improve; they informed everything about that era. The year, as they reckoned it, was 2106 A.D., just a hair under fifty thousand years ago. It had been a time of amazing advance. Motorisation displaced animals, and was displaced in turn by flight, and then rocketry; from burning compressed plant remains to yoking the very Sun to their harness; from illiteracy to the first Internet; from wood to carbon tubes. Ever-increasing technology was theorised, argued about, pontificated upon. Where would it end? Would it end? It came as an unpleasant shock when it did." - foamy Mankind rejected the notion that there would not be the next great breakthrough in understanding of the universe. Hence on January 1st 2106 AD they constructed what would become known as the Science Supercluster: a massive farm of servers running multiple copies of billions of scientists from every dicipline, to both go over every recorded experiments in humanity's past, and to craft and oversee new ones, in order to push even further the boundaries of knowledge. The Cluster "Running on fast time, more subjective manhours passed for the uploads in the first month of the Supercluster project than has, cumulatively, for the entire biological human species." - foamy The cluster began as a massive server-city on the dark side of the Moon, maintained and expanded by mindless robots. Additional farms were later added as outposts near Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, and finally to space near Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt as well. Lightspeed lag was used as an advantage to avoid groupthink. Experiments massive in quantity, scale, and in both, were conducted. They were analyzed, and new experiments designed. A particle accelerator was built to girdle Mars. Strange things were done in the crushing atmospheres of the gas giants. For 26 years, the Supercluster networks and their science facilities continued to grow. At its height, the SSC consumed a full 26.8% of Sol's industrial production abilities to do its work. And while near everything was improved, from a mathematically optimal chess-game to better carbon-chains to more efficient fusion, no sweeping or groundbreaking discoveries were made. And over time the number of advances instead of increasing, began to slow down. The uploads in the SSC seemed to take this the hardest, and their interaction with outsiders dropped to minimum. The Failure "Eventually, the by-then quintillions-- even the overarching monitoring and operating systems couldn't keep an exact count-- of consciousnesses housed in the Supercluster nets would emerge only to report results-- ever rarer-- or to demand more resources-- ever more frequent." - foamy The massive requests of resources, to maintain and expand the server farms and the number of experiments, could not be sustained. For 26 years the Supercluster had grown and yet it kept demanding always more resources. The rulers of Sol degreed to place limits on the Science Supercluster, as despite the massive resource investment only diminishing results seemed to come about as time passed. Eventually, even as the resource consumption reached its peak on 2132 AD, the Cluster was capped at 8.33% of Sol's industrial output - still an incredible number in terms of energy and materials, but far below what the Cluster desired. But even that didn't kill the project, as it continued for a century longer. New uploads were added, burnouts were cycled out, experiments continued. And for a while longer, diminishing results continued to come in. After last two decades of total futility during which the only new results being marginally better auditing processes, on April 21st 2229 AD, roughly 35 years after the launch of Audacity, mankind chose to believe their eyes over their dreams, and decided they now knew what there is to be known of science - that there were no great mysteries left to solve, nor a method to overturn any of the known scientific Laws and limitations. The courts of reality had ruled in favour of Einstein and all geniuses like him, whose groundbreaking discoveries turned out to be the last despite massive investments to prove otherwise. The Technological Plateau had been reached, and the Science Supercluster was shut down as a failure. This led to the greatest recorded mass-suicide in Sol's history as 90% of the uploaded consciousnesses within it chose to die alongside the SSC.